“You look as though you are thinking hard, my clever wife,” said Simon. “You have been in Nabban far more than I have and your family is still powerful there. What should we do?”
Miriamele shook her head. “Clearly my Nabbanai kin are busy adding fuel to the fire, almost certainly for their own purposes, and I would not trust my cousin Dallo Ingadaris even to hold my reins for fear he would steal my horse. But there are still many other Ingadarines I trust. I’ll write to them and see how things appear from where they sit, and whether the fight between brothers is as dangerous as Pasevalles suspects.”
“We’ve already heard enough of this Drusis to think ill of him,” Simon said. “He’s an arrogant, troublesome fellow, no doubt. But surely one man cannot provoke an entire nation into war by himself.”
“It seems unlikely,” said Eolair. “But stranger things have happened. In any case, as Your Majesties pointed out, we cannot send troops when they have not been requested—the Nabbanai would rightly resent it. And this is only one letter. Pasevalles is from Nabban himself, so perhaps he feels its storms more strongly than the rest of us would. But when we return—well, perhaps greater attention to Nabban would not go amiss. They are a numerous and often quarrelsome people. I beg the queen’s pardon if I offend.”
After a moment’s silence, Miriamele said, “Offend? No, Eolair, I say it often enough myself. But we’ve barely begun this journey and already I see troubles growing everywhere.” The sun, though its beams still sparkled on patches of snow and the sky was empty of clouds, seemed to have grown dimmer. “I wish we were home.”
“We all feel that way, my love,” Simon told her. “At least, at times like this.”
He Who Always Steps On Sand, why did you lead your child to such a strange place?
The gods of Tiamak’s childhood in the Wran were nowhere near as powerful and ever-present as the deity his employers worshipped, but there were times he couldn’t help thinking that a little closer oversight from them might still be in order, especially on this royal progress into cold northern lands.
He pulled his cloak tighter. He would never become used to drylander clothes, but he was inexpressibly glad to have the right sort of garments for these chilly northern lands instead of what he had worn in the first part of his life, seldom more than a breechclout and occasionally a pair of sandals. Even thinking about what it would be like to cross into frigid Rimmersgard in such near-nakedness made him shiver, although several of the riders nearest him had taken off their helmets to enjoy the early spring sunshine.
Sunshine, he thought. Back in our swamp, no one would have called such thin gruel “sunshine.” It is not hot enough here to lure even a cold turtle out onto a rock.
It was not that Tiamak missed his marshy home, exactly; even in Village Grove he had been an outsider, a strange young man who had learned to read and write and had gone to Ansis Pellipé in Perdruin to study—an actual city! But he missed the security he had felt as a child in the swamp, beneath the spreading branches and heavy leaves, when everything had been known and familiar. Now it seemed that the more years passed, the more strange the world became.
Not too many years from now I will truly be old, he thought. Will the world be completely strange to me then?
Tiamak had never been this far north before, that was part of it. Not only the cold air, but the very size of the sky seemed foreign, the broad expanse of blue so wide that he almost felt as though he stood atop some terrible high plateau instead of on a broad plain of streams and snow-dotted meadows. But the snow was finally vanishing with the warming days, Tiamak reminded himself; he should remember to say a prayer of thanks. At the same time last year, as his comrades never wearied of telling him, this part of Osten Ard had been hip deep in swirling, mounding snow, the skies gray as lead.
So that is a good place to start with my gratitude, he told himself. Thank you, He Who Bends the Trees. Thank you for any sun at all and not too much snow!
He might have felt differently, he suspected, had they not been called north by such a sad circumstance, the imminent death of Duke Isgrimnur of Elvritshalla. Had it been anything less, though, he would probably not have accompanied the king and queen. But Isgrimnur had been Tiamak’s friend as well. Along with Miriamele, who was then only a young girl, they had faced impossible, almost unbelievable odds together and survived. That alone would have obligated Tiamak to travel to this unsettling part of the world, but over the years his friendship with Isgrimnur had become something more, something completely unexpected. The sulfurous duke, big as a house, as he had first seemed to Tiamak, had proved to be as wise as he was loud and as subtle as he was brave. They had stayed in touch by letter, only a few per year stowed in the diplomatic posts that passed between Elvritshalla and the Hayholt, but enough to keep the friendship very much alive.
And in fact, for most of that time it had been a three-part friendship, because Isgrimnur’s wife Gutrun had always carefully gone through her husband’s letters, adding in the words the duke had forgotten in haste, correcting the occasional woeful mistake of grammar (Isgrimnur was equally bad in his native Rimmerspakk, she had often told Tiamak) and adding her own comments full of useful news and funny stories about her husband. The news of Gutrun’s death several years ago had been one of the saddest days of Tiamak’s life. He had spent very little time in her actual company, but in her husband’s letters, peeping out from between his scrawled lines, she had made a home for herself in Tiamak’s heart.
It was so hard to lose her, he thought. And now the duke. Why does She Who Waits To Take All Back wait so long? Why must the reaping wait until we have grown so used to the world, when the pain will be sharpest for both the dead and their survivors?
Tiamak adjusted himself on the hard carriage seat. He had not become so much of a northerner now that he liked to ride a horse, nor was he large enough to comfortably ride one for long even if he wished. He had a donkey they kept for him in the stables back home, an unpleasant but reasonably steady creature named Scand, but there was no question of Tiamak riding the beast on this trip, where it would struggle every moment to keep up with the horses. Instead, the little man sat beside the driver atop the carriage meant for the king and queen—not that they had used it yet as anything more than a moving cabinet for their clothing and other belongings. Back at the Hayholt, Tiamak only rode Scand when he wished to be outside, and almost always in the company of young Princess Lillia and her pony. The royal granddaughter was nearly as pig-headed as the donkey, but Tiamak loved her in a way he would never have imagined possible, more even than he had loved his sisters’ children, as much as if she had been of his very own flesh.
It was not solely his loyalty to Simon and Miriamele that made it so: Tiamak liked the heir Prince Morgan well enough, but there was something about the little girl that pulled and tugged at his heart, and when she called him “Uncle Timo” he was quite helpless. Even if there had been anything left for him back in the Wran, even if the elders there had begged him to come back and be their chief, Tiamak knew he might not have been able to leave the little girl behind. He wanted to watch Lillia grow, see that clever mind fill with more and more understanding, watch her learn to put that powerful ambition to some higher task than simply forcing her slave-uncle Tiamak to build complex waterwheels for her in the mud of Kynswood streams.
But losing Isgrimnur or missing little Lillia were not the only sources of Tiamak’s discomfort. When the news came to the Hayholt about the duke, Tiamak had just begun his great work. Planning it had been the work of years, but instead of seeing it finally come to fruition he was here, a hundred leagues away from the castle and weeks from returning, knowing his work had all but stopped in his absence.
And I am no longer young, he thought sadly. Who knows how much time I have to complete this sacred task?
It was only a library, most people would say, a collection of books and scrolls, the kind of thing Isgrimnur himself might well have thought a strange waste of space and time, but it was to be the first true open library ever built in the northern lands, and to Tiamak, who as a child had wondered if he might ever own a real book, it meant the world. Conceived to honor Miriamele and Simon’s late son, Prince John Josua, the unfinished library was already precious to Tiamak, who had cared for that young man very much. John Josua had loved books and learning as much as the Wrannaman did, and he had ambitions to make it a great center of scholarship in the young prince’s name.